“The Proteas have been criticised so often in the past for not winning matches of this type and this augurs extremely well for the ICC Champions Trophy in June.

“There will only be eight teams competing so there will be no easy matches there and every contest will, in effect, be a knock-out encounter.

“Although this series win was a good team effort I would like to single out our captain, AB de Villiers, who has now done the double of being named man-of-the-series in both the Test series as well as the one-day series against Pakistan. The greater his workload the better he seems to play and he has been absolutely outstanding as leading runs scorer, wicketkeeper and captain.

“He is growing into the job very quickly."

De Villiers was the leading run-scorer in the series with 365 runs and on Sunday he steered his side home after they were in trouble early on.

The skipper was unbeaten on 95 off 111 balls and shared an 87-run fourth-wicket partnership with Farhaan Behardien (35). De Villiers and David Miller, not out on 20, took the team over the line, notching up 208 runs for the loss of four wickets, with six overs to spare.

“It is incredible to think that we have now won 300 ODI matches starting with that historic series in India in 1991 with an overall winning percentage of almost 64 percent which is outstanding by any standard," continued Appiah.

“I would also like to thank both teams for the manner in which they have conducted themselves during a long and highly competitive tour. Pakistan came to South Africa on the back of an ODI series win in India and it has been a huge achievement to beat them in this series.”